Yays, Nays and OKs for 3-9 Stanford football

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Nov. 30, 2023

In my quick-and-dirty 2023 Stanford football preview, I predicted that the Cardinal might compile a 4-8 record, “with Hawaii, Sacramento State, Colorado and Cal being the four likeliest victims and Arizona and Washington State the most vulnerable clubs among the middling-strength opponents.”

I turned out to be overly optimistic. The Farm gridders finished with their third straight 3-9 season, matching their 2-7 Pac-12 Conference record in 2021 and besting their 1-8 league mark in 2022. The Cardinal’s victims were Hawaii, Colorado and WSU. The team played Sac State close but ultimately sustained an embarrassing 30-23 home loss to the Football Championship Subdivision squad in the Stanford Stadium opener. Later in the year, Cal overcame Stanford on the Farm in an ultimately successful Bears effort to qualify for a bowl game. (Indeed, the Cardinal lost all seven of its home games, in what my research suggests is the worst home showing in any season of Stanford football.)

Some of my predictions held up fairly well. To wit:

In week two, the team will travel to Los Angeles to play conference-title contenders USC and reigning Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams, who could lead the most prolific offense on the West Coast if not the nation. In week three, Stanford faces Sacramento State. A home game against an FCS foe would normally be an automatic win, but the Cardinal is in a fragile state, and the Hornets will be highly motivated to snatch a win from their former head coach. The week four home game against Arizona, which went 5-7 last year, is also winnable but even more of a challenge than Sacramento State. On Sept. 30, the Cardinal finishes its home stand against Oregon, which could face USC in the conference title game.

USC had the nation’s fourth-most-prolific scoring offense. The Cardinal was in a fragile state, and the Hornets were indeed motivated to beat Stanford’s new head coach, former Sac State leader Troy Taylor. Stanford was highly competitive in a 21-20 loss to Arizona, which went on to finish third in the league with a 9-3 record, including six straight wins to close out the regular season. (The Wildcats benefited from changing quarterbacks — a move they made at Stanford after their original starter was injured.) Oregon will play in the league title game, although they will face Washington, not USC.

I also wrote:

In ascending order of quality, UCLA, Oregon State, Washington, Oregon, Notre Dame and USC are the toughest teams on the schedule; Stanford would do well to stay within one or two scores against these squads. Beating any of them, let alone more than one of them, would be a season-defining accomplishment.

As it happened, the Cardinal lost to those teams by margins of, in the order listed above, 35, 45, 9, 36, 33 and 46 points. I don’t think my opponent quality ranking really holds up here; Washington became the first team in the current Pac-12 configuration to go 12-0 in the regular season, while USC went 7-5. But Stanford’s close game against the Huskies was indeed a high point in a season with relatively few of them.

The Cardinal did not beat those higher-level foes, but the Comeback in Colorado over the lower-tier Buffaloes was indeed a season-defining accomplishment. Unfortunately, Colorado turned out to be the only league team with a worse circuit record than the Cardinal. The Buffaloes went 4-8 overall and 1-8 in the conference, while Arizona State matched the Cardinal’s 3-9 (2-7) marks.

One last quote from that preview. I wrote, in part: “I suspect that the Cardinal may struggle to get to four wins. A loss to either Hawaii or Sacramento State would seriously jeopardize prospects for a three-win season.” The first sentence was correct. The second sentence was arguably right, although perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that a loss to one of those teams would jeopardize the chances of a four-win season. A different outcome against the Hornets would have left Stanford with a 4-8 record, assuming no other results changed.

At any rate, the season was what it was: A difficult campaign full of frequently terrible play on both offense and defense.

Yays

• E.J. Smith, running back. The senior from Dallas finished the year as the Cardinal’s leading running back. Unfortunately, he was the team’s third-leading rusher, with his 216 yards (on 53 attempts) trailing two quarterbacks on the squad, and his only touchdown on the season came in the opener at Hawaii. He earns a Yay because of his receiving game against Notre Dame: Smith caught seven balls for 116 yards, smashing his previous career high of 37 yards against Colgate. He helped set up a field goal with a 53-yard catch-and-run that turned out to be the longest single advance by either team. Smith has career rushing totals of 109 carries for 555 yards and five scores and career receiving figures of 59 catches for 386 yards and one score.

• Elic Ayomanor, wide receiver. The sophomore was arguably the best performer and almost certainly the biggest surprise on offense this season. He caught 62 passes for 1,013 yards and six touchdowns, all of which led the squad. The Medicine Hat, Alberta, resident became Stanford’s first 1,000-yard receiver since J.J. Arcega-Whiteside in 2018 (1,059 yards) and only the second since 1999. Ayomanor finished fourth in the Pac-12 with 84.4 yards per game. Among Cardinal with at least three receptions this year, he had a team-high 16.3 yards per catch. His 294 receiving yards at Colorado led all Pac-12 receivers this season and ranks second in Pac-12 history; his 97-yard catch-and-run score in Boulder was the longest reception by a league player this year. Ayomanor, who ranked 20th in the Football Bowl Subdivision in receiving yards, was named the team’s offensive most valuable player at the annual team dinner.

• Joshua Karty, placekicker: Part 1. “Ol’ Reliable” connected with kicks of 34, 23 and 56 yards in the first half before seeing a 56-yard attempt in the fourth quarter get blocked and returned for a touchdown. The successful 56-yarder was a season-long for Karty and indeed for all Pac-12 players. Karty made his mark on all manner of Stanford kicking records this year. He knocked through 23 three-pointers this season and finished his career with an 85.0 percentage, both new records. (Conrad Ukropina, connected on 82.4 percent of his 51 kicks in a four-year career ending in 2016 and made 22 field goals in his last season, now sits in second place on both lists.) The Burlington, N.C., resident is fifth place in school career extra point percentage (72 of 73, 98.6 percent), just behind Ukropina.

• Joshua Karty, placekicker: Part 2. Last year, Karty set the school record for longest field goal, tied a school record with five field goals (in a game that Stanford won without any other scoring) and became the first Stanford kicker to hit all of his field-goal attempts in a season (with a minimum 10 tries) by going 18 for 18. His 27 for 27 mark on extra points in 2021 created a 13-way tie atop the Stanford season PAT percentage list (although eight kickers hit more point-after kicks without missing). In short, we’ve seen a superlative collegiate athlete who I expect will go into action in the NFL next year.

• Takeaways. On Notre Dame’s first possession, cornerback Jshawn Frausto-Ramos became the first Cardinal to force and recover a fumble on one play since Trenton Irwin did so against San Diego State in 2018. Minutes later, junior inside linebacker Ese Dubre forced an Irish fumble that sophomore cornerback Terian Williams recovered, setting up a go-ahead Cardinal touchdown. Early in the second quarter, freshman safety Che Ojarikre picked off an Irish pass, enabling a go-ahead Karty field goal. After the game got out of hand, in the fourth quarter, senior inside linebacker Spencer Jorgensen picked off another Irish throw. These were the first times these players had ever been involved in a turnover, although Jorgensen blocked a UCLA punt in 2019. The first three takeaways helped keep an overmatched Cardinal team competitive.

Nays

• Defense. Stanford finished 129th in the Football Bowl Subdivision in scoring defense (37.7 points per game) and yardage defense (461.7 yards per game). There are 130 FBS teams. Notre Dame converted an appalling seven of nine third downs. On the season, the Cardinal defense allowed 79 of 154 third downs to be converted for an FBS-worst rate of 51.3 percent. Stanford defensive coordinator Bobby April has a lot of work to do with his unit in the offseason. Hopefully he and Taylor will be able to bring in more players who are suited to top-level college football after the decline in recruiting and roster retention at the end of head coach David Shaw’s tenure.

• Third-down offense. Stanford converted just five of 16 third downs against Notre Dame. On the year, the Cardinal offense went 66 for 183 for a rate of 36.1 percent. That beat out only Arizona State in the league and tied with Virginia for 94th in FBS.

• Scoring offense. The Cardinal averaged 20.6 points per game, which again ranked ahead only of Arizona State in the Pac-12. Nationally, the Cardinal was in 110th place in this category.

OKs

• Gaethan Bernadel, inside linebacker. I could not in good conscience list an individual defender as a Yay given that the Cardinal defense let up 521 yards, including 381 on the ground. (Stanford as a team had 359 yards of total offense.) But the junior, who finished with a team-high 87 tackles (45 solo) on the year, was again superb against Notre Dame. Bernadel recorded 11 tackles, his third double-digit effort of the season, with a season-high two quarterback hurries. If he returns to the Farm next year, the Miami native could anchor a Stanford defense that had few other playmakers in 2023.

• Justin Lamson, quarterback. The sophomore led the Cardinal in rushing on Saturday with 82 yards gained on 10 tries. His 49-yard scramble in the first quarter was the second-longest run by a Stanford player in 2023 after Casey Filkins’s 59-yarder against USC. On the year, Lamson netted 334 yards and five touchdowns on 120 attempts, all of which led the team. No Cardinal quarterback had had as many rushing TDs since Kevin Hogan had six in 2015, when Stanford made its last Rose Bowl run. Indeed, no Cardinal player of any kind had as many touchdowns as Lamson since Austin Jones ran for nine in the pandemic-shortened six-game season in 2020. Unfortunately, the Syracuse transfer isn’t nearly as effective through the air, going two of six for 19 yards against the Irish and only 38 of 88 (43.2 percent) for 504 yards with two picks and no scores.

• Penalties. Stanford was sixth in the league with 6.3 penalties per game and eighth with 59.1 penalty yards per game. Taylor and his staff surely want to improve team discipline next year. The Cardinal was hurt by penalties in relatively close losses to Washington (Stanford committed eight penalties for 74 yards) and Cal (nine for 100) and in the blowout loss to UCLA (10 for 113). Penalties were less of a factor in wins over Hawaii (nine for 81; Hawaii had 11 for 114) and Colorado (seven for 74 vs. an astonishing 17 Colorado infractions for 127 yards).